Excused from Service

Rev. Dr. Henry William Greist, whose hospital is the northernmost on the American Continent, announced last week that after 16 years at Barrow, Alaska he and his wife must leave their stern post. Reason: ill health. Since 1920, Dr. & Mrs. Greist have been "outside" only once, eleven years ago. Now, after a visit with relatives in California, a visit to Monticello, Ind. where Dr. Greist left a private hospital to go to Alaska, a visit with their only child David at Stony Brook (L. I.) School for Boys, the Greists are going to Europe, perhaps to Africa. That is where Dr. Greist wanted to go when he was graduated from Indiana University's School of Medicine 42 years ago. His mind was changed for him when he was ordained a Presbyterian minister and sent among the Eskimos.

Dr. Greist's Alaskan medical-missionary district covers about 120,000 square miles. Over the tundra of that vast region he was accustomed to make two trips a year by dog-team, carrying the Gospel and purgatives to the Eskimos, performing marriages, pulling teeth.

The Presbyterian Mission hospital at Barrow contains nine beds, accommodates additional patients on the floor. Dr. Greist solved the problem of water supply by connecting a large iron drum to the hospital stove. In the drum is kept a constant supply of melting ice. For help in the hospital Dr. Greist depended on Mrs. Greist and another trained nurse.

Last spring when influenza struck Barrow, Dr. Greist had the busiest period of his career. Eskimos have little resistance to influenza. In addition, hunting and fishing had brought them so little profit in recent years that they were undernourished. At the epidemic's darkest moment, Dr. Greist had 13 dead Eskimos lying in his Presbyterian church waiting until their tribesmen could get together enough wood for coffins, dig graves in the frozen earth.

Isolated though he is 550 miles north of the railroad terminal at Fairbanks, Dr. Greist has nevertheless been host to several prominent U. S. citizens during the last decade. In 1926 Explorers Roald Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth, having sailed a dirigible across the North Pole, paused at Point Barrow, eleven miles north of Dr. Greist's settlement. More recently, the Lindberghs, flying to China, visited the Greists at Barrow. Last August when Flyers Wiley Post and Will Rogers crashed on a river bank 15 miles from Barrow, Dr. Greist embalmed their bodies.

Last autumn Dr. Greist wrote to his superiors on the Board of National Missions of the Presbyterian Church: "Now I am beginning to feel that the Lord is ready to excuse me from further service on this coast. Prayer and earnest seeking after the mind of the Spirit causes me to express myself thus. I have nothing to regret save my limited ability to serve Him. Many souls have been brought to the Lord Jesus Christ and I have preached the word with all faithfulness. And yet I shall leave my heart within this far North for whose people I have poured out my very best."

To carry on Dr. Greist's pastoral work, the Presbyterians have assigned Rev. Frederick G. Klerekoper, 1933 graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary. Mrs. Klerekoper is a trained nurse.

To carry on Dr. Greist's medical work, the seven other white people and 300 Eskimos at Barrow have petitioned the Government for "a full-time resident doctor and a competent staff of nurses, and the installation of up-to-date surgical equipment."

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